The Urge to Start Over

Think I’ll dump the relevant life updates first and quasi-philosophical babble afterward.

A series of events that happened one after another kept me busy for the past few weeks. First, my home desktop broke down, and the subsequent hardware hunting took me some time. This time I’ve decided to buy all the parts from a local Microcenter instead of online to save delivery time. Not long after my computer is up and running again, I picked up a guitar for my birthday and began spending time to practice it. In between all those things I’ve spend more time then I’d like to admit on Borderlands. Oh, and I had some sort of jaw/gum/tooth problem that floored me from last weekend till the middle of this week. That pretty much wraps up everything that happened between my last updates and now.

The pain from my jaw is still there. I’m actually not sure if it’s related to my wisdom tooth since at its worst I’ve gone down with a fever, but the pain feels totally different – there’s no bleeding, the wisdom tooth is still hiding under the gums and there’s no throbbing except for the muscles between the jaw and the cheek. It’s been reduced to a minor numbing pain since Wednesday but it still hasn’t gone away. I’m getting a bit worried.

My guitar self tutorial had been a bit rough – the free instructions that came with the guitar lacked details, so I fumbled through a lot of things and hoped that it’s the right way to do it. More importantly I recently discovered that I skipped a lesson and was half wrong with what fingering belongs to which chord, so between going back to the missed lesson and relearning the proper chord names, it had me wishing that I could just start the whole guitar learning thing over…

And it just seems to be a thing that I do (or try to do) a lot, on every aspect of life.

Take Borderlands, for example: I screwed up the questing order for the first character that I made and instead of rolling with it I started over. Same thing happened with Fallout 3 too – I got very irritated whenever something went off my plan and I’d get this urge to just delete whatever progress I’ve made and start over.

When I’m starting out a new coding project, I’d look at my old code and feel extremely uncomfortable reusing it, and I would start a new code library from scratch, even though most of the time I just end up rewriting the same thing anyways with a few name changes.

It’s like somewhere down the line in my life I’ve lost the ability to improvise and now I insist that things go according to plan or I’ll have nothing to do with it. This usually doesn’t go over too well when there’s other people involved. It’s something that I’m actively aware of, and one of these days I’ll relearn how to roll with unexpected turn of events again.

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